Christopher Honey

Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!

Excited to be teaching a new undergraduate course on Models of Language and Conversation this term!

Check it out here: context-lab.com/llm-course/

I've added lots of fun interactive demos of chatbots and NLP techniques that let students dig into the approaches.

Some exciting opportunity for NeuroAI research at Johns Hopkins!

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

I am very excited to announce that over the holidays, my first ever paper (w/ @samiyousif.bsky.social) was published in Cognitive Science! Here, we describe a new illusion of *number*: The Crowd Size Illusion!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

What if we could tell you how well you’ll remember your next visit to your local coffee shop? ☕️

In our new Nature Human Behaviour paper, we show that the 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 can be measured with neuroimaging – and 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘁𝘀 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘄𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗸.

Studying memory narratives with natural language processing Cognitive neuroscience research has begun to use natural language processing (NLP) to examine memory narratives with the hopes of gaining a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms underlying differenc...

Quantifying memory recall is hard! Luckily, natural language processing (incl. #LLMs) offers new, automated, and scalable ways to do that!

Great new review by Fenerci & @signysheldon.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
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Replay in the human visual cortex during brief task pauses is linked to implicit learning of successor representations | PNAS Humans can implicitly learn about multistep sequential relationships between events in the environment from their statistical co-occurrence. Theore...

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social

#compneuro #neuroskyence

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New paper with @mujianing.bsky.social & @prestonlab.bsky.social! We propose a simple model for human memory of narratives: we uniformly sample incoming information at a constant rate. This explains behavioral data much better than variable-rate sampling triggered by event segmentation or surprisal.

The House committee for NSF/NASA/NOAA is meeting tomorrow (Tuesday) at noon ET. Now would be a good time to call anyone on this list & tell them to keep science funding at full 2025 levels. You can remind them that 75% of voters want tax-funded science and they're concerned about the impact of cuts.

Sinclair Lab The Learning & Behavior Change Lab at Rice University, directed by Dr. Sinclair

Excited to share my new lab website!

The Learning & Behavior Change Lab will launch at Rice in July 2026. I’ll be recruiting over the next year! @ricesocsci.bsky.social

www.sinclairlab-rice.com

Music is an incredibly powerful retrieval cue. What is the neural basis of music-evoked memory reactivation? And how does this reactivation relate to later memory for the retrieved events? In our new study, we used Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to find out. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Pleased to say "Space, Time, and Memory", an academic book by Oxford University Press edited by the inimitable Lynn Nadel & Sara Aronowitz is now out.
I contributed a chapter, "Memory and Planning in Brains and Machines".
You can download the entire book for free:
library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

I just signed the Bethesda Declaration and urge you to do the same today, so that we all stand with NIH researchers as Battacharya appears before the Senate Appropriations Committee tomorrow.

‘A big win’: Dubious statistical results are becoming less common in psychology Fewer papers are reporting findings on the border of statistical significance, a potential marker of dodgy research practices

Thrilled to see a news piece by @science.org on my recent paper. By analyzing p-values across >240k papers, the study suggests that the rate of statistically questionable findings in psychology has declined since the replication crisis began

www.science.org/content/arti...

Brain mechanisms underlying the inhibitory control of thought - Nature Reviews Neuroscience The capacity to prevent unwanted thoughts is important for cognitive function and mental health. Anderson et al. describe insights into the neural mechanisms of the inhibitory control of thought that ...

How does the brain stop thoughts? Find out in my article in @natrevneuro.nature.com with Subbu Subbulakshmi & Maite Crespo-Garcia www.nature.com/articles/s41... that integrates 25 yrs of psychology and neuroscience on this vital function.@mrccbu.bsky.social sky.social #neuroskyence #neuroscience

🧠🤖 Computational Neuroscience summer school IMBIZO in Cape Town is open for applications again!
 
💻🧬 3 weeks of intense coursework & projects with support from expert tutors and faculty
 
📈Apply until July 1st!

🔗https://imbizo.africa/

Congratulations, Q! Thoroughly deserved!

I’m thrilled to announce that I will start as a presidential assistant professor in Neuroscience at the City U of Hong Kong in Jan 2026!
I have RA, PhD, and postdoc positions available! Come work with me on neural network models + experiments on human memory!
RT appreciated!
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Yes, that would be my default setting. But as I used the AI-agent over time it could become graded. I purchased your book based on an ad that I saw on your website, and I really enjoyed the book. So perhaps I would instruct my AI-agent to relay certain ad information but not others?

Presumably the AI-agent would still be able to view the ads and report back to their user if they came across something advertised which would be interesting/useful for their user.

I guess you are considering the case where the user explicitly tells the AI not to inform them of anything ad-related?

FINALLY.

Some gumption from the President of Harvard today:

All I can say is that the subjective effect size of the difference is very large and beyond what I would normally question. Once I start to question the validity of such judgments, I don't know how I could trust the majority of my waking self-report.

I've (on occasions) had normal waking imagery that is vivid. That waking imagery is just like the vivid imagery that I (much more often) experience near sleep. I agree that I'm always comparing two past states here, which involves some kind of memory function.

I am close to aphantasic (~2 out of 7 visual and auditory). However, there is an exception: I experience visual and auditory imagery when I am on the edge of sleep. So I know what imagery is, and I just don't experience it at other times. I don't know *how* I could be so wrong in subjective report.

Synaptic plasticity rules driving representational shifting in the hippocampus - Nature Neuroscience Madar et al. report that behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity (BTSP), not spike-timing-dependent plasticity, explains heterogeneous place fields shifting in the hippocampus. The probability of BTS...

BTSP, but not STDP, can account for place field changes in hippocampus, out in Nature Neuroscience today:

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠📈 🧪

The time zone for the deadline is "Anywhere-On-Earth".

cool!